SEO Secrets for Wordpress.com

Everybody wants to know about SEO. Everybody wants to make Google their bitch. And some days it seems like EVERYONE wants to run giddily away from WordPress.com so they can access the supernatural power of the All In One SEO plugin and I’m just about fed up with destroying their pretty little dreams one by one, but I do it because I must.

Listen closely:

There is no combination of plugins or sooper sekret SEO tricks that you can use with an independently-hosted blog that will give you the same SEO advantage, all other things being equal, of an out-of-the-box WordPress.com blog. It is the single best platform for SEO that I have ever seen, and the primary reason is the Global Tag System.

Every public post that uses a particular tag or category counts as a link from that post to the Global Tag Page for that tag or category, so that Global page gets to be very, very important in Google’s eyes. VERY important.

And that very, very VERY important page also links back to each blog post that used that tag or category, right? So some very, very VERY important page is linking to your little post, and Google says “well, heck, she must be important, let’s give her a doozy of a pagerank!” and poof, you’ve got Googlejuice up to your nostrils.

And this is a very good thing.

Technorati tags don’t work the same way; they don’t have that googlejuice-maximizing effect. And WP.com tags function as Technorati tags anyway, not that anyone cares about busted old Technorati anymore.

So do use tags and/or categories on your posts; the distinction is arbitrary at WordPress.com, but if you’re intending to move then put some thought into your hierarchy, because on independent blogs it DOES matter. Staff suggest using no more than 12 categories and/or tags on any individual post; more than that and you risk getting classified as a tag spammer and dumped out of the global pages entirely (your posts will still link to them, but they will not link back to you).

Another thing you can do to maximize SEO is use keywords wisely. I won a bet with a very senior Drupal developer about how fast I could get on the front page of Google for the term “camel cheese.” I said within 48 hours I’d be number one, but alas I never made it; still won the bet, though, because he bet it would take weeks to get on the front page, and it took less than ten hours. I went home, blogged it, and went to bed; when I woke up I was #3. And it was keywords (well, keywords and tags!) that did it.

Here is another example I posted in the forum:

The single best way to add keywords to your blog (other than tags and categories as previously mentioned) is in the content. Use them in your titles. Use them in your filenames for uploaded images. Use them in your Alt text.

For example:

I did a post on the Toronto Explosions. I titled it “Toronto Explosions”, I started it with an image the filename of which was “Toronto Explosion 2” and captioned “Toronto Explosion” and linked to a post on another site called “Toronto Explosions” and the alt text on the link was “Toronto Explosion photos” and in my first sentence I used the term “Toronto explosions.”

That post has been #1 on Google since twenty minutes after I put it up. It outranks every news organization on the planet in searches for “Toronto Explosions.”

And that is how it is done. Figure out what your post is about, put that in the title, put a picture of whatever that is up front because a picture is four places to put that keyword (the filename, the alt text, the caption and the description), and then use the word early in your post; the earlier the better. And do it honestly, with integrity, because if you put on your Evil SEO thinking cap and try to scam, Google will find out, and they will throw you in the sandbox and bury you.

There was another tip I was going to give you, but I forgot what it was, so you’ll just have to wait until I remember to blog it!

Oh my god, you’re moving to TUMBLR? You might as well shoot yourself in the head if SEO matters to you. Move straight back to WordPress.com and don’t ever, ever speak of this again. I mean, seriously, you MUST be joking. I have a Tumblr with a technorati authority of over 500…it has a Google pagerank of 1. My WP.com blog with a similar authority has a PR of 5.

I’ve had a self hosted WordPress blog for about five years. And I tried the All in One SEO plugin and I don’t know what the big deal is. Yoast has a tutorial for using it and about 27 other things. I’ve been following it, can’t say it has made a difference. You have so many more headaches updating on selfhosted, especially if you’ve been using WordPress since 1.something, that is a lot of database updates, a lot of depreciated function calls in you theme, a lot of fixing of your sidebar.php, your PHP.ini, you wp-config.php, so many more things to worry about, and I’m not sure you get that much of a SEO benefit.

I’m trying WordPress.com for a hobby blog, but sadly in this hobby all the main blogs are on blogspot, they use FriendFollow and little groups to drive traffic…

Ugh, tsp says all Blogspot blogs have over 100 errors in their HTML right out of the box, before you even put any content in them.

Use one of the WordPress themes that looks like one of the Blogger themes that was invented to look like WordPress; then only the smart ones will figure out what’s different about you. Well, that and that you out-google them.

All In One SEO is something I installed on my independent blog, and it’s a pain in the ass! Why in god’s name should you have to fill in the title when the title of the post is already filled in? It’s just ridiculous. I haven’t noticed any effect either, but it’s like being brought up to do human sacrifices. Nobody wants to be the one to find out what happens when you stop, just in case it WAS doing some good.

The Simple Tags plugin and HeadSpace2 might do some good. I’ve spent the last five days improving my blog, not sure if it will really accomplish anything, but I have the satisfaction of knowing five more man-days went into hacking on the theme, the code, etc. etc.

Joined Goodreads, uploaded 160 more photos to Flickr, world domination can’t be far off now.

I’m not a Goodreader; I have enough trouble just reading the books, never mind essentially creating a database of them. But Flickr works; next, you need a Tumblr, to which you post pictures of hipster girls looking stoned and many, many articles about one quirky thing that fascinates you, to show your Renaissance Man chops. That’s what everyone else there does.

Me I’m not terribly clever, but I’ve had sites online since 1995, I remember when everyone was trying to figure out the Alta Vista algorithm. People often claim to have the secret to search engine success. If the All in One plugin is the new Holy Grail so be it, I’m still pretty sure the plugin doesn’t write any content, or link to your site, or do anything really. You can do most things it does, I mean if you really want to do the best possible in search engines, hand code your HTML, or do some sort of Zombie mass link commenting scheme. Lots of people seem to think that works, I don’t think they’re genius when I have to delete 100s of spam comments.

Good luck with your new self host blog. Good luck upgrading it too, I know how many days I’ve lost trying to fix the automatic update when it doesn’t work.

Ah yes the comment spam and trackback spam. That was somewhere the self hosted WordPress blog had an advantage. I ran Bad Karma and Spam Something 2 for the longest time. Well after Automattic came out with their anti-spam solution. I only switched when the guy who created Spam Something 2 decided not to update it anymore as WordPress’s built in spam fighting was now up to snuff. I had something like 16000 records in my spam database. I have even more on my personal computer…

Now I get less spam but I use DISQUS, but I’m not immune, while I was on the ferry, I got six comments on my blog, all left at exactly 3:30 and likely all identical. Some new keyword combination that gets through the spam filters.

I was going to leave some clever trackback spam of my own, but I’m tired.

Oh, and I’ve got several HUNDRED thousand spams blocked on Raincoaster.com thanks to Akismet. It’s my dream that this blog get interesting and busy enough to get that much attention from India and China.

Akismet that is it, I couldn’t remember the name of the new WordPress spam solution. DISQUS uses that too, or it can.

My self hosted blog still seems a bit screwy. I purged old spam from database of comments at some point, but I don’t seem to get spam from China and India, people there actually read my blog. I get spam from Russians and Eastern Europeans and likely Canadians, British, and Americans.

I added this new plugin called Spam Magnet it tells me which posts spammers like to spam the most. Generally there are a few old ones that are always popular then whenever I post something and use certain tags or keywords it brings the spammers out. Lately some of their spam has gotten incomprehensible as they are spelling words so wrong to beat the filters, I don’t even know what they are selling.

[…] Image via CrunchBase Everybody wants to know about SEO. Everybody wants to make Google their bitch. And some days it seems like EVERYONE wants to run giddily away from WordPress.com so they can access the supernatural power of the All In One SEO plugin and I'm just about fed up with destroying their pretty little dreams one by one, but I do it because I must. Listen closely: There is no combination of plugins or sooper sekret SEO tricks that you … Read More […]

[…] Raincoaster Media had a rant about people leaving WordPress.com or WP.com, basically the free blogging platform run by Automattic for a self-hosted WordPress installation like Muskblog. Apparently some plugin which I’ve been using for years and not been terribly blown away is the latest savior of people who think their hit counter validates their existence. The reason you have a self hosted blog is you want to use a wider variety of plugins, have a custom theme, maybe show some ads, maybe even blog about something controversial, you shouldn’t do it just for search engine optimization. You want to do better in search engines, write better content. […]

[…] knows, I’m a bore on the subject, but it bears repeating: WordPress.com is the best platform I have ever seen, in pure SEO terms. This naturally pisses off a great number of webbies who make their living setting up sites on […]

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